Extinction Event

I used to pass a large stone on my way back and forth from my studio. It was an oddity in the landscape, upright in a low-lying, fallowed area.

I grew up not far from there, near a similar field, which, like many, has seen itself buried under the fill of the expanding suburbs.

It was an object to consider one in relationship to, it holding gravity there, and its gravity weighing the time and the space. It’s the type of object one circulates around, metaphorically, physically, an anchor and a way to see what else circulates with it.

We are so small, yet we create such big change, and it’s so hard not to be human centric with everything.

I gesture that the stone was ‘liberated’ from the development site (it was taken in the early hours of a Sunday morning without permission), taken from the crease that formed in the transitions of value. It was an object disturbed and dumped. An object colonized into our systems, and now a part of it.

The stone was sandblasted clean, in the mark-making language of our industrialized lives, like the bulldozers whose own language of process leaves a thick veneer of non-place on which we construct our world.

It was a making as an unmaking, and partly a foreshadowing and echo. It was an intentional removal of biological life and aestheticizing of form.

I wonder about our construction of the landscape and where it is we allow ourselves to live in relationship to other metaphors, identities, other behaviours that are not of our invention or control.

The rock was installed in a gallery, on a bound stack of unused pine scaffolding. Intentionally a minimalist gesture that suspended the object in art’s conceptualized space, while knowing that this will never truly be its undoing and that it is defiant in itself.

Since then it has become a part of Ihor Holubizky’s rear yard, and watched, as it re-introduces itself to the elements and that place, turning in its own time.

I used to pass a large stone on my way back and forth from my studio. It was an oddity in the landscape, upright in a low-lying, fallowed area.

I grew up not far from there, near a similar field, which, like many, has seen itself buried under the fill of the expanding suburbs.

It was an object to consider one in relationship to, it holding gravity there, and its gravity weighing the time and the space. It’s the type of object one circulates around, metaphorically, physically, an anchor and a way to see what else circulates with it.

We are so small, yet we create such big change, and it’s so hard not to be human centric with everything.

I gesture that the stone was ‘liberated’ from the development site (it was taken in the early hours of a Sunday morning without permission), taken from the crease that formed in the transitions of value. It was an object disturbed and dumped. An object colonized into our systems, and now a part of it.

The stone was sandblasted clean, in the mark-making language of our industrialized lives, like the bulldozers whose own language of process leaves a thick veneer of non-place on which we construct our world.

It was a making as an unmaking, and partly a foreshadowing and echo. It was an intentional removal of biological life and aestheticizing of form.

I wonder about our construction of the landscape and where it is we allow ourselves to live in relationship to other metaphors, identities, other behaviours that are not of our invention or control.

The rock was installed in a gallery, on a bound stack of unused pine scaffolding. Intentionally a minimalist gesture that suspended the object in art’s conceptualized space, while knowing that this will never truly be its undoing and that it is defiant in itself.

Since then it has become a part of a rear yard and kept by its keeper, and watched, as it re-introduces itself to the elements, and in its turn, that place.